Editor note 9.3.2024: This article has been updated to appropriately reflect Lin Yu-Ting’s surname.
Editor note 9.8.2024: Updates to further highlight the antisemitic and anti-Indigenous views in the interview Anna Slatz did with the Canadian Nazi Michael Thurlow in the Baron.
During the 2024 Paris Olympics, the International Boxing Association (IBA), far right activists, TERFs, and conservatives launched a harassment campaign against two female boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan. The attacks on both athletes were based on dubious claims by the IBA that they were intersex, had XY chromosomes and thus were “male” and should not being competing against “real” women. Representatives of the IBA published these claims in Russian media outlets and the story was then picked up by the far-right TERF media outlet Reduxx, which spread these claims to the Anglosphere. From Reduxx it spread to TERFs, conservatives, anti-trans organizations, bigoted individuals with large online platforms and eventually more mainstream media outlets.
This article sets out to document how writers at Reduxx helped drive the harassment campaign in the English-speaking world, highlighting how they were motivated as much by racism and Islamophobia as they were by interphobia and transphobia. As will be shown, Anna Slatz, co-founder of Reduxx and the first to write about the two athletes at that outlet, is a far-right activist with has a long history of attacking Muslims, immigrants and people of color in addition to attacking trans people. The influence of Reduxx is an example of the growing overlap between the anti-trans movement and the far-right and the damage such a merger can cause.
Table of Contents
What is Reduxx?
Reduxx is a media outlet that focuses almost exclusively on trans women who’ve been accused of crimes or abuse, focusing especially on allegations of sexual violence. The site resembles media created by conservatives, white supremacists and fascists that focus on crime committed by Black people or immigrants, using real or invented instances of harm to paint an entire demographic as dangerous and subhuman. An article from the Southern Poverty Law Center describes Reduxx as “nothing but rabid transphobia: Like many white nationalist websites that list endless pages of “Black crime” meant to suggest that Black people are inherently prone to criminality, Reduxx is an endless scroll of alleged trans sex offenders and pedophiles. The site is regularly used as a source by right-wing news outlets, including, especially, Fox News.” Marketing her hate speech as “”pro-woman, feminist media”, Slatz has taken propaganda techniques utilized at far-right outlets she used to work for and tailored them to her audience of TERFs. She is thus another example of a far-right actor using transphobia to influence the larger anti-trans movement and push it further to the right.
Anna Slatz and Genevieve Gluck, the TERFs behind Reduxx
Anna Slatz and Genevieve Gluck founded Reduxx in 2022, with Slatz acting as editor-in-chief and Gluck as “Chief Investigative Journalist”. By the time she started Reduxx, Slatz already had history of working in far-right media. In 2018 while working as the editor of the University of New Brunswick’s student newspaper, Slatz (then known as Anna De Luca), published an interview with and an op-ed by Michael Thurlow, the leader of the National Socialist Canadian Labour Revival Party. Slatz gave Thurlow a platform to express his Nazi views, antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews secretly controlling the world and anti-Indigenous racism, including downplaying the violence of residential schools. After facing criticism, Slatz defended her decision to publish both pieces but lost her job at the paper soon after. Slatz went on to work at far-right outlets including the Post Millennial and Rebel News and had pieces published at Quillette and Canadian TERF Meghan Murphy’s outlet Feminist Current. Slatz has written anti-trans articles at multiple outlets she worked for. Her former employer Rebel News has played a major role in spreading Islamophobic propaganda and hate speech in Canada and beyond and Slatz herself has made many Islamophobic and racist comments. In one instance she praised a UK police officer attacking a Muslim man and wishing more police acted so violently.While at the Post Millennial she spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, including that the virus was created in a Chinese lab. During her time working for far-right outlets, Slatz has also produced media scaremongering about antifascists and accusing them of being agent provocateurs.
In addition to co-founding Reduxx, Genevieve Gluck created a podcast called Women’s Voices. Gluck pushes the transmisogynistic theory that trans womanhood is a fetish driven by consumption of pornography. She’s shared this theory in the right-wing outlet Spiked and on Meghan Murphy’s podcast. Genevieve Gluck has appeared on Michael Knowle’s show on the Daily Wire to push the absurd theory that “sissification hypnosis pornography” is turning cisgender men into trans women. She’s also appeared on ecofascist Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio. Like Slatz, Gluck has also written for Feminist Current.
Both Anna Slatz and Genevieve Gluck have appeared on Women’s Declaration International’s Feminist Question Time. Founded in the UK, WDI is an international anti-trans feminism organization with chapters around the world but primarily based out of the Global North. WDI attempts to push anti-trans politics worldwide and influence international bodies such as the United Nations. They regularly host Feminist Question Time webinars where TERFs, SWERFs and other reactionary feminists from around the world network and give presentations.
Timeline of Events: How the IBA and Reduxx Laundered Disinformation into the Mainstream Press
In March 2023 the International Boxing Association disqualified Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting at a tournament in New Delhi, India, claiming that the two athletes had failed sex tests and thus were ineligible to compete against other women. This fits into a longstanding pattern of Black and Brown female athletes from the Global South being more likely to face sex tests, punishing women of color for not meeting white supremacist standards of femininity. Khelif was disqualified just days after she beat the previously undefeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva. After Khelif’s disqualification, Amineva’s perfect record was restored. The IBA has made conflicting claims about what exact tests were performed, sometimes claiming they were testing testosterone levels and other times chromosomes, and have refused to give exact details. Khelif and Lin have competed without issue in other tournaments both before and after this particular incident. Representatives of the IBA revived their claims during the 2024 Paris Olympic in response to the two women being allowed to compete in the games.
The IBA has a long history of corruption and misconduct. Sports writer Steve Bunce, explaining why he doesn’t believe the IBA’s claims about Khelif, states that “I have been at IBA tournaments in Budapest, Houston, Plovdiv, Antalya, Belfast and, obviously, the Rio Olympics. I have been an eyewitness to coups, threats and some of sport’s most outrageous decisions. And, you guessed it, every decision, so the IBA claim, was taken with the interests of the sport at heart.” Karim Zidan wrote an in-depth article looking at the history of IBA’s corruption and conflicts with the IOC and how this relates to the IBA’s attacks on Khelif. After the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the organization, then known as AIBA, was investigated for corruption after over a dozen boxing matches were fixed. This led to the president of the organization, Wu Ching-kuo, to be removed and banned from the sport but his replacement,Gafur Rakhimov, wasn’t exactly an improvement. Rakhimov allegedly trafficked in heroin and had connections to Eurasian and international crime groups. Rakhimov resigned after the IOC suspended AIBA’s status as a governing body for boxing for the Olympic games. This suspension dealt the organization a significant blow and led to it being excluded from the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games and the 2024 Paris Games. In 2020 AIBA rebranded as the IBA and elected its current president Umar Kremlev. Kremlev has strong ties to Putin and the Russian state and is a member of the ultranationalist Nine Wolves biker gang. It was through the Nine Wolves that Kremlev met the leader of Putin’s security service, Alexei Rubezhnoi, who helped Kremlev connect with Putin directly. With his political connections, Kremlev was able to gain control of the Russian betting market and in return uses his position as head of the IBA to advance Russian political interests. Most Russian athletes were barred from competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, with only Russian athletes who’ve denounced the war being allowed to compete. “Given the multitude of ways that Russia employs sports as a vehicle for soft power, it is unsurprising that a Kremlin-backed Russian boxing group would orchestrate a misinformation campaign around gender eligibility testing to incite outrage against the IOC,” states Zidan at the end of his article. He goes on to state that “[b]y tapping into the ongoing culture war over gender norms, the organization running world amateur boxing has positioned itself as a self-proclaimed defender of women’s sports, and managed to create a major controversy at the center of the Olympics.”
The IBA correctly realized that by casting doubt on Khelif and Lin’s sex they’d be able to stir up international controversy and call the credibility of the IOC into question in the process. But for this to work they needed the help of sympathetic media to spread their claims to an audience that’s been primed to react aggressively towards the purported threat of “men taking over women’s sports”. This is where outlets like Reduxx came in. Reduxx exists primarily to incite hatred and harassment against trans women, including trans women athletes. Their audience is ready to hate on any female athlete who doesn’t fit cis-centric bioessentialist sex/gender norms, be they trans, intersex or a cis woman who doesn’t appear conventionally feminine.
On July 27, Reduxx published an article authored by Anna Slatz that repeated IBA president Umar Kremlev’s claims that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting had XY chromosomes and therefore should not compete alongside “biological women”, citing an article from TASS News, a Russian outlet. Slatz never claimed that either athlete was trans but rather that they were “impacted by a Difference of Sexual Development” or intersex. Slatz referred to social media posts from Brianda Tamara, a Mexican boxer who had fought and lost to Khelif at the Golden Belt tournament in Guadalajara and later questioned Khelif’s sex, claiming that she’d never been hit so hard by another boxer before. This led to rumors that Khelif was a trans woman, rumors which were quickly debunked in the Mexican media. Slatz also quoted Marshi Smith, co-founder of ICONS. Back in March 2023, ICONS had attacked Khelif and Lin after the IBA disqualified them.
As soon as the Reduxx article was posted, TERFs, “gender critical” activists, bioessentialists and other bigots started to spread it around. While Reduxx’s article claimed that Khelif and Lin were intersex, many TERFs and other transphobes on hearing that the athletes were “biologically male” assumed that they were trans women. Others speculated about what particular intersex conditions the athletes supposedly had. WDI-USA, the US branch of the WDI, posted the article on their social media and Kara Dansky, former president of WDI-USA, wrote about it on her SubStack. Prominent TERFs, including Meghan Murphy and Maya Forstater, recognized Reduxx’s role in spreading the story about Khelif and Lin. On July 29, Richard Dawkins shared the article claiming that Khelif and Lin were “men masquerading as women”. Elon Musk replied to Dawkins, stating that this was “unfair”. Dawkins later lies about his FB account being deleted because of this tweet.
Barry McGuigan, a former professional boxer and president of the Professional Boxing Association, was another influential figure who shared the article on Twitter. On July 29, Sean Ingle published an article about “[b]oxers who failed gender tests” in the Guardian which cited Barry McGuigan’s tweet sharing the Reduxx article but without referring to the article itself. He also referenced the same TASS News article the Slatz cited in her article. Both Anna Slatz and Genevieve Gluck accused Ingle of stealing Slatz’s story and called on him to give Reduxx credit for first “breaking the story” two days before.
While it’s impossible to know if Ingle read Slatz’s article, he must have at least know about it from McGuigan’s tweet. One can easily imagine a journalist from the Guardian being reluctant to cite a website that consists almost entirely of hate speech, thereby calling his own outlet’s appearance of respectability and moderation into question.
On July 30, JK Rowling shared the Guardian article, kicking more hostility and harassment towards Khelif and Lin. Rowling didn’t share the Reduxx article but she’s shared articles from them in the past, so it’s possible that she read it. On August 5, Rowling retweeted Jill Foster quotetweeting Genevieve Gluck claiming that Castor Semenya was “one of three males with a DSD who cheated women out of medals during the 2016 Olympics in Rio”.
Reduxx continued to publish articles and make social media posts to incite harassment against Khelif and Lin. One article published on August 3 cited an interview with István Kovács, the European Vice President of the World Boxing Organization and former Secretary General of the International Boxing Association, from Magyar Nemzet, a conservative Hungarian outlet with close ties to the Orban regime. Kovács repeated claims that Khelif was “biologically male”. The article once again quoted Marshi Smith from ICONS and Slatz later thanked Smith and other members of ICONS for their help with Reduxx’s stories. Reduxx claimed that members of their outlet were invited to IBA’s press conference held on August 5. In any case Reduxx posted videos from the press conference on their social media accounts and trumpeted IBA’s claims. Reduxx published two more articles on August 11 and August 13. A majority of the articles focused on Khelif and her supposed “male” strength and physiology.
Anna Slatz’s racism and Islamophobia
Based on statements made by Slatz, the focus on Khelif could be connected to Slatz’s own Islamophobia and racism as well as to her simplistic biodeterminist views on sex and gender. Slatz frequently makes statements on her social media indicating her belief that Muslim men and immigrants from the Middle East and Arab countries are prone to violence and dangerous to white people. On August 5, Slatz stated that she wouldn’t be watching Olympic boxing anymore since if she wanted “to watch a Muslim man assault a woman in public while nobody does anything about it” she’d go to Germany.
Slatz further claimed that Muslim cultures and Middle Eastern and North African countries perpetuate “gender ideology” where “DSD men” are regularly raised as girls because of strict gender roles. She compared the Arabic concept of kuntha, a term for intersex people, to sexologist John Money’s theories and practices. Money was known for assigning intersex children a sex and prescribing genital surgery based on their (in)ability to be penetrated in future heterosexual intercourse. Slatz alleges that Muslims engage in similar practices and Khelif is really an “intersex male” pushed into the female gender role because she was supposedly born with “malformed genitals”. How Slatz knows the status of Khelif’s genitals is anyone’s guess. Slatz paints Muslim and Arab societies as too ignorant and backwards to understand biological sex, associating “gender ideology” with cultures she views as inferior. In Slatz’s mind, fears about violence from Muslim immigrants merges with fears about “female erasure” and assaults on “biological womanhood” by trans and intersex people having the right to define their own sex and gender.
Conclusion
A far-right TERF propaganda outlet played a core role in amplifying and re-launching the IBA’s harassment campaign against Olympic athletes Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, using tactics they’d first used to attack trans women. Since the founding of Reduxx, Anna Slatz, Genevieve Gluck and other TERFs have been inciting vicious hatred and harassment against trans women using classic far-right and fascist propaganda tactics. Now they turned their sights on two cis women of color who don’t fit their narrow views of binary sex. It’s notable that they focused much of their attention of Khelif, a Muslim woman from Algeria, blending their hatred of trans and intersex people with hatred of Muslims and people of Arab and African descent. Reduxx ends up feeding their audience not only far right views of sex and gender but also of race and ethnicity, with co-founder Slatz citing “Muslim gender ideology” as what lead to “violent men in women’s sports”. Slatz, who’s made her whole career creating far-right propaganda and disinformation, first drew in an audience who detest trans women and can now direct that audience’s bile towards members of other groups she despises, in this case a Muslim woman from North Africa. Reduxx’s propaganda/disinformation campaign against Khelif and Lin is a good example of the real world damage caused by the increasing overlap between the anti-trans movement and the far-right, the circle of hate and harm keeps expanding over time to include more oppressed and marginalized groups.
If Reduxx can help incite an international harassment campaign against two Olympic athletes, just imagine the damage they cause to ordinary trans women trying to live out in the world. Reduxx produces propaganda that makes society more dangerous for trans women, spreading the lie that trans women are a threat to cis women, making it harder for them to safely use women’s spaces, compete in sports alongside other women or simply move through the world unmolested. While Khelif and Lin have received much attention and support for the attacks made against them, the ongoing attacks Reduxx and similar outlets make against trans women largely go unnoticed. The kind of hatred Reduxx directed at Khelif and Lin is targeted at trans women constantly but doesn’t causes the same level of outrage.
Anna Slatz, Genevieve Gluck and the other writers at Reduxx need to be taken seriously as a threat, not only towards Olympic level cis women athletes but to the trans women they incite harassment against regularly. Reduxx is a prime example of how the fight against the anti-trans movement intersects with the fight against fascism and white supremacy. We need to understand these connections to better resist fascists, TERFs and other reactionaries and create a world where we can all be safe and free.